When we are looking to grow and develop ourselves or others, there's potentially an infinite number of places we could start.

This can present some issues:

• How do we avoid growing overwhelmed with options, which in turn can keep us from getting started?
• How do we avoid wasting precious development efforts on something that is considered of low impact or importance by either ourselves or the ones around us?
• How we identify what should be our top priority, and avoid focusing on too many things at once (thereby diluting our progress in any one area)?

To cut down on the number of options and better identify where our potential is the greatest, the platform uses the concept of assessments.

An assessment is a high-level, opinionated perception of how well someone masters something (i.e a role or a skillset), and how impactful we would expect it to be if they were given the proper development opportunities and applied themselves.

Assessments are meant to help people systematically collect input on potential from both themselves and others, and use that information to prioritize their development efforts.

Why you might want to use assessments

Use cases for assessments include:

• People development
  • Build awareness, reflect on and identify your own biggest potential for improvement
  • Crowdsource input from others (friends/familiy/team members/leaders/mentors) on what they consider to be you biggest improvement potential (as an input into identifying our ambitions). In other words: Granting people permission to tell you how you suck.
  • Identify the basis for a custom management or talent development program
• Hiring and firing
  • Assessments and self-assessment in the context of recruiting (i.e. the people skills of a leader), and have that assessment follow over into the employment relationship for accountability and further development efforts
  • Assess new hires at the end of their probition period
  • Assess someone who is thought not to be working out very well
• Motivation
  • Identify High Potentials (HiPos) within an organization
  • Let people know that their high performance (and potential) isn't going unnoticed

Separating assessments from similar concepts

Assessments bear some resemblance to other, neighbouring development concepts, like ambitions, familiarity and proficiency. Here's how assessments differ from:

• Ambitions: Like ambitions, assessments are holistic, focusing on high level development like roles and skillsets. Unlike ambitions, assessments only point to potential areas of improvement, whereas an ambition signals a concrete decision for someone to improve within something.
• Proficiency: Like proficiency, assessments reflect an opinion on level of mastery. Unlike proficiency, assessments provide a subjective and opinionated view on performance as seen from the perspective of the assessor, whereas proficiency is a person's company agreed upon level of mastery within a given skillset.
• Familiarity: Like familiarity, assessments can be used for self-evaluation and self-reflection. Unlike familiarity, assessments are more high level, allowing a person to identify in which areas (roles and skillsets) they have the most potential for improvement, before diving in and investing more time in indicating familiarity.

During an assessment, the person doing the assessing is asked to evaluate someone's current performance and the expected impact of improvement if that person were given the proper development opportunities and applied themselves.

Based on these two primary factors, the system calculates a person's potential. The calculation looks like this:

Potential = Impact + (Impact - Performance)

The different performance and impact options are assigned the following values in the calculation:

• Performance
  • Poor: 0
  • Moderate: 1
  • Well: 2
  • Outstanding: 3
• Impact
  • None: 0
  • Limited: 1
  • Moderate: 2
  • High: 3

Here's are a couple of calculation examples:

Someone's is considered to be performing Well (2) in a role, with a Limited (1) improvement impact. Their potential is calculated as 1 + (1 - 2) = 0.

Another person is considered to be Moderate (1) in a particular skillset, with a High (3) improvement impact. Their potential is calculates as 3 + (3 - 1) = 5.

To assign meaning to the outout of the calculation, they resulting scores are grouped into the following labels:

• -3 - 1: No potential
• 0 - 2: Limited potential
• 3 - 4: Moderate potential
• 5 - 6: High potential